On 24 and 25 February, a sizeable group of candidates to the senate and the lower house
will be trying to have themselves elected by millions of Italians by promising a new
government and the best of all possible worlds. And so all the various saviours of the
bank accounts and the class-based re-equilibration of capitalist accumulation will stand
up and present themselves as the paladins of democracy and national salvation. ---- It is
theatre of the absurd as staged by the Italian bourgeoisie, and it would be comic if we
were not in such a tragic situation, with the social butchery being carried out thanks to
the freedom-killing, authoritarian measures of the Monti government, cheered on from the
wings by two thirds of the parliament. And of course, before him there were the neoliberal
policies of Berlusconi and the PD that impoverished millions of workers and pensioners,
those who have always been the target of choice for the financial bourgeoisie's
class-based policies once they came to power with the rise of the neoliberal phase of
capitalism.

But media control and the support that it offers the political clique is necessary to save
at least some suggestion of a parliamentary democracy that, although it is still the
bourgeoisie's means of dominion over the proletariat, has changed profoundly over the
years and is reaching an important turning point in the construction of new, authoritarian
management policies being imposed by the wider bourgeoisie.

We are being asked to vote, while workers are excluded from any possibility of democratic
participation in the workplace. While farcical bargaining agreements exclude the workers
from any form of collective practice. While the destruction of the social state sees the
involvement of all areas of power, from the Catholic church through all the various
parliamentary parties to the mafias, eager to invest their money. While environmentally
devastating works are being carried out on the territory and any citizen who opposes them
is repressed by the police forces. Pensioners on the breadline and workers reduced to
desperation through redundancy today have no chance of political representation through
the normal channels of parliamentary democracy.

In the absence of vigorous social and revolutionary opposition, the lower classes are
excluded and unrepresentable by the authoritarianism of capital which only heaps on their
backs the social costs of the reconstruction that is in progress. The revival of a
communist right and of populism stuffed with good intentions and good sentiments that are
being proposed as institutional reference points of forms of resistance, incapable of
leaving behind the ambiguity of the seat in parliament and the desire to represent, are
unable to offer a real political option. They are merely sad, useless approaches that will
do not more than contribute to their role, as long ago written by the capitalist bourgeoisie.

Today more than ever any electoralist approach to the political question is superfluous.
The lines drawn on a European level by capitalist power, by the financial bourgeoisie,
leave no space for manoeuvre. No parliament today is able to change the class-based,
anti-worker policies that are hitting entire populations all over the world. Smooth
talkers from the Right and the supposed Left, hell-bent on winning the seats they hold so
dearly, are not overly worried about coming up with an alternative to the advancing
barbarism. The things that count, the power of money, the power of the Catholic church,
the power of the mafias, they are all untouchable pillars of the grand system on which
power is based. The growth that all aspire to continues to be the growth in profits and
inequality, in the exploitation and impoverishment of the human, material and natural
resources of this country, to the benefit of the usual few.

As part of the redefinition of constituent powers that have set out the lines of
intervention and of the fall of political and social control in Europe - and the policies
of the Monti government are their most authentic expression in the case of Italy - the
differences that appear in the distinctions between the parties are just a marketing
operation in view of the elections - to each voter his or her own, but keeping the
authoritarian and somewhat fascist substance of the new race for accumulation.

The real struggle has been and will be directed against the weaker classes, forced into a
situation where it is impossible to respond collectively, still trying to win political
space that will never arrive from the seats of parliament, but which once again in history
will have develop out of the concrete interests of the exploited.

We must rediscover an autonomous, class-struggle point of view, one which lies outside any
compatibility with the system, so that through class struggle we can take back the right
for us to imagine a society for us, a communist and libertarian society, and resist the
attacks by capital and the siren song of democratic formalism.

Today more than ever it is essential that we once more emphasise the autonomous,
class-struggle position of libertarian communists, not giving in to those who would see us
as players in a show that does not belong to us, where Monti's manifesto or the moves to
balance the State's books are there to remind us how untouchable the general plan laid out
by the powers is.

They are powers that need to be undermined at their very foundations, without shortcuts or
illusions, by building non-institutional paths for representation and demands beginning
with our concrete needs, through class unity, taking back the instruments of combative
syndicalism, defending our rights and in particular our right to a decent job, town by
town, against the social barbarism and devastation, refusing to pay the costs of poverty
and desperation. We must unmask those who call other workers even more coerced than us our
enemies, be they here or elsewhere, in Europe or in China, and also all those, be they
bosses or workers, who say that we are all in the same boat, the hostages of powers so
remote that they cannot be fought.

The crisis cannot be fought by those who created it and by those who take advantage of it.
Only the direct involvement of each and every one of us and the capacity to recognize in
each single struggle in our neighbourhoods and in our factories, in our schools and in our
anti-fascism, a piece of the freer and more just society that we want for all, only this
can lead to the real construction of the libertarian alternative. And no amount of
electioneering can do that.